Staging American Corporate Culture : 5 Early American Business Plays 1887-1917

Five uproarious plays that chronicle the rise of the modern American business model through the impudent lens of late 19th and early 20th century Broadway.

This collection introduces the satirical examinations of business, found in American theatre through the 20th and 21st centuries. In many ways, these plays serve as a template for later works of art like the hit series Mad Men, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and Meredith Willson’s The Music Man: comedies of business, hustlers, and the hustled.

These plays range in theme and era from the volatility and dumb luck of late 19th century Wall Street (Bronson Howard’s The Henrietta, 1887); to the farcical feverishness of making and losing money in business quickly (Winchell Smith and Byron Ongley’s Brewster’s Millions, 1906); to the practice of modern business scams (George M. Cohan’s Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, 1910); to the growing prominence of advertising (Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett’s It Pays to Advertise, 1914); and implementing a seat-of-the-pants business model based on the popular idea of Scientific Management (Harry James Smith’s A Tailor-Made Man, 1917).

The comedy, satire, and farce of these plays provides not only a portrait of the beginnings of modern American business, but a surprisingly timely examination of business morality (or lack of it). Accompanied by a scholarly introduction for the plays and time periods as a whole, as well as brief introductions to each play, Staging American Corporate Culture is a hugely entertaining and utterly interesting introduction to these late 19th and early 20th century attitudes